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Spotlight - Week of December 17, 2018

DNA damage repair starts with the recognition of damaged sites from predominantly normal DNA. In eukaryotes, diverse DNA lesions from environmental sources are recognized by the XPC nucleotide excision repair complex. Studies with Rad4 (yeast XPC ortholog) showed that Rad4 “opens” up damaged DNA sites by inserting a -hairpin into the duplex and flipping out two damage-containing nucleotide pairs. However, characterizing the dynamics of these conformational changes along the lesion recognition trajectory has been challenging.

Anjum Ansari, Ph.D.

Professor of Biophysics, Department of Physics, The University of Illinois at Chicago